is thorough hardware knowledge essential

Your question should really read, "Does a knowledge of hardware make a better software person"?

Posed that way the answer is almost always yes unless the work that the software person does involves no more than the turning on of a computer.

Itis inevitable that a software person will become involved in the hardware architecture of the system on which he works and then..a hardware knowledge is essential.

I take the biased position of a hardware engineer of some 25 years experience and I find that my understanding of software is almost always stonger than the software developers understanding of hardware. This gives me a holistic knowledge which in itself a very competative advantage over my software breteren. Without that holistic approach to your environment you run the risk of being very segmented or demarked in respect to your understanding of the IT community.

Your answer MUST consider what your software does! If you build animated (game) software yes (but to a limited extent). If you build business (database) software yes (but to a limited extent. What is CRITICAL is the business software developer's grasp of business analysis as related to data modeling (or database structuring). What is CRITICAL is the animated software developer's grasp of screen redraws as related to memory and cache use.

In other words YES - but don't waste to much time worrying about it because 90% of todays certifications involve hardware management and your skills data modeling or animating are much more valuable (AND UNIQUE).

Yes it assolutelu necessry for a software engineer to have hardware knowledge because if you will not comletely understand the basic computer architecture then how can you explain the working procedure of certain software and also if you want to interface certain device with the computer then obviously you have to develop pragramms that can freely access the computer hardware and for that you must have to have the necessary hardware knowledge otherwise you have to depend on somebody else.
Alsoto troubleshhoot your PC and debug your software programms and to diagnose what is the cause of error and why it is occuring.
Ultimately software persons should have hareware knowledge to avoid above mentioned situations.
Thankyou

A software person should have a "good" working knowledge of hardware. How much, and how detailed that knowledge should be depends on the type of software support he or she provides. A software support technician should have a good knowledge of hardware at the operational level. One anecdote that comes to mind was the battle between two technicians at the school district I work for. They hated each other. One day the superintendant called, and said his mouse didn't work. The software technician went, looked at it ( this was pre windows days ), and said it was a hardware problem. The hardware technician was sent, and he came back and reported it was a software problem. Both went back one more time to look at the problem. Finally the Directorof technology asked me, the new guy to look. The answer was simple, a menu program the Sup had loaded had placed itself one line above mouse.com in the autoexec.bat.

Programming software requires a knowledge of the "nuts and bolts" of the hardware, especially video. I cuss everytime I think of a very expensive software package we purchased ( not by my recommendation ) that required every machine using it to reset the display properties to 256 colors at 800x600. Manually, through the desktop. The company said this was to maintain compatibility with older machines, even though the program they sold had minimum requirements of a PII 400 with 32mb of ram. Not too many of those out there with video cards that can't support this display resolution.

Depending on the type of support you are doing, it sometimes is not necessary to have in-depth knowledge of hardware.

Where I am employed, there are technicians for both hardware and software. I personally do both, but the gist of this is that when software problems(assumed) arise, our software technicians look at the customers machine and diagnose for software, about 50% of the time they are referring to hardware techs. Then we go out and further diagnose the problem.

In summary, knowledge of hardware is usually situational, depends on techs persoanl needs.

Unless you have a lot of time on your hands, you may think about just self-studying. I have no idea on what you should study as I do not know what type of equipment you work with. There are a lot of books out on PC equipment. One good one is "PC Hardware in a Nut Shell" another one is "The Indispensable PC Hardware Book : Your Hardware Questions Answered". Again I don't know what you exactly do... so here is my best guess at helping you.

I think you all have a piece of the pie correct. Unfortunately, only a piece. I beleive it all comes down to decisions (choices). If I want to work for a big company, I need to be a specialist (let the hardware geeks do the hardware stuff, I want to work with software). If I want to work for a small company (I,m the only geek), you have to be a generalist. You could also turn that question inside out - that is - do I want to be a generalist or a specialist. Once that question is answered, you then have to decide just what you want to spend your time on. I certainly believe that hardware knowledge helps in your understanding of how things work in order to solve software problems. As well as I beleive that knowing assembler helps your understanding. But I also know that there are people that solve those problems without that underlying knowledge. It just may take them longer.